An Unhappy Anniversary

IT has been a bittersweet month for Poland. Behind the elation over unprecedented political reforms and civil liberties lies a sour reminiscence. This month, Poland observes the 50th anniversary of its rape at the hands of the Germans and Soviets. In September 1939, these two countries ruthlessly violated Polish sovereignty and carved up the ancient state between them.

Now, out of respect for the state they helped destroy, the Soviets should own up to one of their war-time atrocities. Specifically, they should end the half century-long cover-up of a heinous crime in the Katyn forest.

It wouldn't be difficult. Difficult would be cutting Poland free from the strangling grasp of the Warsaw Pact. Difficult would be resuscitating the Polish economy after years of stale communist leadership. Difficult would be restoring Polish self-confidence after a half-century of subjugation.

A confession would be a relatively painless gesture for the USSR and a matter of national pride for the Poles.

ON August 23, 1939, Germany and Russia signed a pact that included a secret agreement to partition eastern Europe, including Poland, between them. A few weeks after signing the agreement, the Red Army rolled into a Poland already prostrate from the German blitzkrieg. The Soviets deported thousands of Poles--including 14,500 officers--to Russian labor camps. Their motives are not difficult to discern; they wished to short-circuit any future Polish leadership.

Ten thousand of these officers were never heard from again. Historians speculate that they either died in forced labor camps or were murdered outright.

The fate of the rest is well-known. Invading German armies found 4443 corpses in a mass grave in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, USSR. Each victim had a bullet hole in the base of his skull. Each still wore his uniform, and each lay face-down over his fellow officers. Trees had been planted over the bodies.

Forensic evidence showed that the slaughter occured in 1940--well before the Germans occupied Katyn.

THE massacre itself is tragic; the subsequent cover-up is tragi-comic. Despite almost incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the USSR has consistently maintained that the Germans were responsible for the massacre. The Soviets, at least until recently, served up duplicity and intimidation when faced with questions about Katyn.

At Nuremberg, the USSR added the massacre to the list of charges against Hermann Goering, but quietly dropped the accusations for lack of evidence. And during the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, Soviet forces leveled a monument to the slain officers.

Unwilling to own up to the crime but unable to conjure up a convincing alibi, the USSR hoped the problem would fade from Polish and international consciousness.

It didn't.

In 1987, in the spirit of glasnost, the USSR agreed to establish a joint commission with Poland to investigate the massacre. This spring, the Polish delegation grew impatient with their Soviet counterparts and announced their findings independently. They blamed the Red Army.

What further evidence or impulse could the USSR possibly need? The Poles know, as the Soviets must, that fifty years doesn't make a confession stale or irrelevant. Not irrelevant to the windows of the dead officers. Not to Solidarity, nor even to the Polish communist party, both of which lost potential leaders at Katyn.

The political climate in the USSR is ripe for a confession. Criticism of Stalin and Russia's past mistakes is now chic. Adding another item to Stalin's list of atrocities is unlikely to provoke a conservative reaction, especially when the defense is so untenable. And with the recent Soviet acceptance of the binding decisions of the World Court, including its 1948 condemnation of genocide, Moscow's confession would be timely.

OF course, appeals to moral decency have rarely carried much weight with the Soviet government. But an appeal to self-interest might. Never has Polish opposition to Soviet domination been so brazen as it is today. A Soviet apology for the Katyn massacre would be an important symbolic step towards the construction of a more cooperative and less autocratic Warsaw Pact.

Meanwhile, each passing year finds fewer and fewer Poles alive who remember a day, fifty years ago, when a husband, brother or father disappeared mysteriously on a train heading east.